Strange Candy

by Laurell K. Hamilton

  There was no sound in the garden but the boy's labored breathing. Then the climbing rose moved; a mere whisper of silken petals, but it was enough. Ailin pointed one small fist at the bush and began to chant.

  Ilis cried, "No, Ailin, no, please!"

  Rudelle was uncertain what was happening, then fire like a furnace blast swallowed the climbing rose. Half the bush melted like hot wax.

  Ilis screamed, wordlessly, and hid her face in her hands.

  Rudelle was numbed at the careless cruelty of it. She wondered, briefly, if she had drawn attention to herself, if the boy would have melted her. Then she stood and strode toward the child.

  Ilis called, "Rudelle, don't!"

  Ailin turned, still angry.

  Ilis called, "Ailin, this is Trevelyn's new wife, your sister-in-law. She doesn't mean any harm. Don't hurt her." Ilis got to her feet, uncertain what to do.

  Rudelle wasn't certain either, but one thing she knew, no ten-year-old boy was going to bully her. And no one had the right to destroy such harmless beauty.

  Ailin said, "I can blast you, just like I did that stupid rose."

  Rudelle kept moving.

  "I can change you into a toad. I bet Trevelyn wouldn't like you so much then."

  Rudelle ignored the threats and kept coming. She was furious and let the anger show on her face.

  Uncertainty showed in his eyes. "I'll do it! I'll change you!"

  His hands raised, and the first word of an invocation trickled from his mouth. Rudelle hit him hard, closed fist, against the jaw. He slid to the ground, boneless as a sack of wheat.

  Ilis crept closer, a look of wonder on her face. "Is he dead?"

  "No, just unconscious."

  Ilis knelt beside the fallen sorcerer and looked up at Rudelle, her eyes shining.

  "But didn't you know he could have killed you?"

  Rudelle shook her head. "I am the middle child of seven, all boys except for me. I am not about to start letting little boys bully me, magic powers or not. Once you let them think they have the upper hand, they do. And he doesn't have it with me."

  Elva reappeared. Ilis introduced them. Elva said, "He'll kill you when he wakes up. No one insults Ailin like that."

  "You speak of him as if he were a grown man; he is not. He is a little boy, and little boys respect and need discipline."

  "Ailin is a sorcerer."

  "And a little boy."

  Elva shrugged. "Have it your way, farmer's daughter."

  Trevelyn walked through the destruction, calling for Rudelle. He hugged her when he found her. "I was worried when I saw the signs of battle."

  Ilis said, "Did you see what Rudelle did?"

  "No."

  Ilis told him, the deed growing a bit with the telling.

  Elva spoke to Trevelyn as if Rudelle were not there. "She won't live out the week."

  Elva vanished.

  He hugged Rudelle tighter and said, "I'll carry Ailin inside and put something on his face to keep the swelling down."

  "I'm sorry that I hit him."

  "I'm not," Trevelyn said.

  She asked, "Ilis, can your rose be saved?"

  The girl walked close to the wounded vine, tears glistening in her eyes. "Yes, but she hurts." The girl sat on the ground, and the surviving blossoms shivered and cringed above her head.

  Trevelyn motioned for Rudelle to come with him and leave Ilis to her magic.

  Rudelle asked, "How are your parents?"

  "Down in the caverns under the house. They have research to do and spells to prepare. They've neglected the magic shop. It'll take me weeks to catch up."

  "They don't like me very much."

  "No, but I love you, and that will be enough for them, eventually."

  Rudelle nodded, but was unconvinced.

  Dinner preparations went forth in the only truly clean room in the house, the kitchen. The maid had kept up in there. Trevelyn watched through the open doorway. Ilis worked beside Rudelle. The girl wore a clean brown dress and clean undergarments. Rudelle had even shown her how to mend rips without magic.

  Ailin was nursing a wondrous bruise, but the boy was peeling potatoes, something his mother could never have gotten him to do. Of course, his mother wouldn't have been basting a turkey either.

  Ilis watched everything Rudelle did with a kind of wonder. Ailin watched her with a wary and unusual emotion, respect.

  Elva came to stand beside Trevelyn. "What have you brought into this house, brother?"

  He smiled. "Peace, cooked meals, love, discipline." He shrugged, "Rudelle."

  "How did you know?"

  "I went to a prophet and paid gold."

  Elva laughed. "It looks like you're going to get your money's worth."

  He nodded. "Rudelle will see to it."

  An explosion shuddered through the house. "What was that?" Rudelle asked.

  Ilis answered, "Mother or Father, they are working spells."

  "Well, my cake is going to fall if they keep doing that. Go downstairs and tell them to please not rock the house until after dinner."

  Ilis looked like she'd lost her mind.

  Elva saved her. "I'll do it. Should I tell them you said so?"

  "Please do, and tell them that if they can refrain from blowing up the house, we will have layer cake, turkey with walnut stuffing, candied orange breads, potato cakes, and fresh greens, courtesy of Ilis's magic."

  Elva grinned. "You fixed all their favorites."

  Rudelle grinned back. "Did I?"

  Ailin said, "Candied orange breads? Really? But it isn't a holy day."

  Elva gave a small bow in Rudelle's direction. "I will tell my parents to stop rocking the house. If you can scold them like children, I can be brave enough to bear the message. Though I will have a sorcerous shield ready when I tell them."

  Rudelle said, "Thank you, Elva."

  Elva laughed and hugged her brother. "That new wife of yours may live out the week." Then Elva vanished.

  "People certainly leave rooms quickly here," Rudelle said.

  Ailin asked, "May I have a candied orange bread?"

  "Just one, or you'll ruin your dinner."

  The boy nodded.

  Rudelle handed him the treat and said, "You've done a wonderful job on those potatoes. You've been a big help, and you didn't waste a spell on it."

  He grinned, mouth full of orange bread, and mumbled, "I don't need magic to peel any old potatoes."

  "Of course you don't."

  Ilis asked, "Rudelle, the water's boiling, now what?"

  "We cut up the potatoes and put them in."

  "Oh."

  Trevelyn listened to the rise and fall of voices, smelled the rich fragrance of cooking food, and smiled.

  HERE BE DRAGONS

  This is the only science fiction story I've ever completed. Hardware-oriented science doesn't interest the writer in me. It's the softer sciences that fascinate me on paper. Of course, just because it's soft science doesn't make it a soft story. One editor rejected this story by writing that it made her feel unclean. Cool.

  SOME people are just born evil. No twisted childhood trauma, no abusive father, or alcoholic mother, just plain God-awful mean. Dr. Jasmine Cooper, dream therapist and empath, believed that, knew that. She had spent too many years looking inside the minds of murderers not to believe it.

  Bernard C. had been born evil. He was sixty, tall and thin, a little stoop-shouldered with age. Thick white hair fell in soft waves around a strong face. At sixty, he still showed the charm that had allowed him to seduce and slaughter sixteen women.

  He wasn't your typical mass murderer. First, he was about fifteen years too old; second, until he started murdering people he had seemed quite sane. No abuse of animals, no child beating, no rages, nothing. Perhaps it was that very nothing that was the clue. Bernard had been the perfect husband until his wife died when he was fifty. He had raised two children, the perfect father. Everything he did was perfect, so squeaky normal that it screamed whe
n you read it. Too perfect, too ordinary, like an actor that had his role down--to perfection.

  Jasmine had studied the pictures; the basement slaughter room with its old-fashioned autopsy table. Bernard had been a mortician before he retired. Jasmine had found morticians to be some of the most stable and sane people she had ever met. You had to be pretty well grounded to work with the dead, day after day. As a mortician, Bernard had been the best, until he retired.

  He brought sixteen women down his basement steps, ranging in age from forty-five to sixty-nine. He tapped them on the head, not too hard, strapped them to his table, and started the embalming process while they were still alive. Technically, most of them just bled to death. Bernard drained out their blood and pumped in embalming fluid, simple. They bled to death.

  But Jasmine knew it was not simple, that they hadn't just bled to death, that they had strained against the tape over their mouths, struggled against the straps at wrist and ankle until they rubbed the skin away and bled faster. As you grow older the skin tears more easily, thin and fine as parchment.

  And Jasmine was in charge of Bernard's rehabilitation. Dreaming. Images swimming, colored clouds floating across the mind. Brief glimpses of places, people, sharp glittering bits of emotion. The dreamer moved in his sleep, almost awake, dreams surfacing, spilling over his conscious mind. Bright memories of make-believe following his thoughts like hounds on a scent. He would remember. Jasmine would see that he never forgot.

  Bernard C. woke screaming. It was the best that Jasmine could do. She had tried to make him remorseful, sympathetic to his victims, but Bernard was a sociopath; he didn't really believe in other people. They were just amusing things, not real, not like he was real. He had embalmed sixteen women alive because he had wanted to do it. It was pleasant--amusing.

  She could not make him feel things he had no capacity to feel. His emotions were a great roaring silence. But he could feel fear for himself. He could feel his own pain. So every night when he slept, Jasmine hurt him. She strapped him to his own table and had his victims bleed him dry. She buried him alive; she closed him in the dark until air burned in his chest and he suffocated. She terrorized him night after night, until Bernard did feel one emotion. Hate. He hated Dr. Cooper, not the burning hatred of a "normal" person but the cold hate of a sociopath. Cold hate never dies, never wavers. Bernard's fondest wish was to strap Dr. Cooper to a table.

  Jasmine knew this, felt it. The therapy was working. And if Bernard C. ever got Dr. Cooper alone, he'd do worse than kill her. He wasn't alone. If you asked most of the men in Clarkson Maximum Security Prison what they most desired in the whole world it was to have Dr. Cooper at their mercy.

  The Clarkson Prison had the highest rate of successful rehabilitation for violent criminals in the country, perhaps in the world. Some had found in their dreams the taste of other people's tears, sympathy for others, at last. Other dreams held the taste of blood, the pulse of their own hearts dying.

  Distance is no protection against psychic ability. Dr. Cooper knew what their dreams tasted of; she could find them wherever they would go. Only death would free them from her, and some of them weren't sure about that.

  Dr. Jasmine Cooper, empath/dream therapist, most hated and feared person in a building full of monsters, was at her desk doing paperwork when the phone rang. She ignored it, knowing the machine would pick up. It did. Her voice first and then, after the beep, a man's voice, "Hello, Jasmine, this is Dr. Edward Bromley, again." Silence, then, "Well, we have a problem at the school that requires your special touch. This is the fifth message I've left, Jasmine. Call me or a child's going to die."

  She picked up at the last moment. "Dr. Bromley." Her voice was utterly neutral, a trick she'd picked up from some of her patients.

  "Ah, yes. Jasmine. I'm glad you picked up. Can we have a visual to go along with the voice?"

  She stared at the small credit-card-thin screen just above the phone. The screen was a blank silver-gray. "No," she said. "What do you want, Dr. Bromley?"

  He sighed. "Jasmine, or should I call you Dr. Cooper?"

  "That would be fine. What do you want?"

  "I would really like to see your face when I tell you."

  "Why?"

  "Damn it, Jasmine...Dr. Cooper. Do you know how hard it was for me to come to you with this?"

  "No," she lied. His anxiety oozed over the lines, trembling with distance and electricity and a touch of fear. Something was very wrong.

  "Tell me what you want, Bromley. What needs my special touch?" Her voice held a bite, sarcasm leaking through her professionalism. She could feel her face crumbling. She didn't dare let Bromley see her like this. She could feel the hate blazing through her eyes, trembling down her hands. He'd see it too. Even he wasn't that blind.

  "There's a problem at the school." He hesitated, only his breathing still hissing through the line.

  "What sort of problem?"

  "Bad dreams, no, nightmares. Freaking, bloody, awful nightmares. We've had one attempted suicide."

  "Student or teacher?"

  "Student, but he was an advanced student. He had training, but the dreams just ate him alive. He slit his wrists because he didn't ever want to fall asleep again."

  Jasmine smiled. "You've been doing this long enough, Bromley. You've got a powerful untrained dreamer in the school. Police yourself."

  "We tried, Jas."

  "No," she said, "no one calls me that anymore." The old nickname crept along her skin, raising the hairs on her arms.

  "Jasmine, then. Do you remember Nicky?"

  "He was a dreamer a few years older than I was."

  "Yes. He's dead."

  She stared at the phone receiver wondering what Bromley's face looked like right now, this minute. A trickle of sweat oozed down her forehead; she wiped it with the back of her hand. "What happened?"

  "He tried to take care of the nightmares. We think he linked up with our rogue dreamer and a blood vessel in his brain burst. An embolism."

  Jasmine swallowed hard, hoped Bromley couldn't hear it. "It happens." Her voice was level, so bland she knew the strain showed.

  "Not to fully trained dreamers. Nicky was almost as good as you were. People with that kind of talent don't burst their brains, not without help."

  "It is impossible to truly kill someone during a dream session. A bad heart, well it happens. Nicky didn't die in dream. He just died. Coincidence."

  "You don't believe that any more than I do."

  "Read any textbook on psychic phenomena, Bromley. You wrote the standard: no one can kill another person by dreaming them to death."

  "We both know that isn't true."

  "There is no record of it ever happening."

  "Because I destroyed the record, Jasmine. You owe me."

  There it was, bland and clear, and no ignoring it. "Are you recording this?"

  "No."

  "Don't be."

  "You think I'd get you to admit something on tape and then blackmail you with it?"

  "Obligate me, maybe."

  "I'm not recording this, Jasmine. Talk to me, please."

  Maybe it was the please that did it, or perhaps the rushing sense of fear. "So you've got another dreamer that can kill during dream. Someone at least as powerful as I was."

  "God, Jasmine, don't ever say it like that again. If someone should overhear..."

  "You said talk, I'm talking. Do you know who it is?"

  "We think so. A student who just arrived two months ago. A ten-year-old girl named Lisbeth Pearson."

  "Why do you think it's her?"

  "We've only got one other dreamer in school right now. Malcolm hasn't got the control. Lisbeth's sucking him into everyone's nightmares. We're hiding all the sharp objects from Malcolm."

  "How old is he?"

  "Fourteen."

  "Ten and fourteen, you're still a baby-raper, Bromley."

  "The school did OK by you, Dr. Cooper. You're the most respected dream therapist in this country.
I saw on the news, you've set up two sister programs in different states. Did you get an invitation to do the same in, what was it, France?"

  "England."

  "Without this school, you wouldn't be where you are."

  Jasmine almost laughed, but it wasn't funny, it was pathetic. He was right. She was keeper of the monsters, thanks to Bromley and others like him. And she hated them all.

  He had asked her something, but she hadn't heard.

  "Excuse me, Dr. Bromley, can you repeat that, please?"

  "When can you get here?"

  Her stomach tightened, palms sweating. "I swore I'd never go back, Bromley."

  "I remember, Dr. Cooper, but this is an emergency. If you don't come here and defuse the situation, I'll have no choice."

  "There are always choices, Bromley."

  "Not here, not now, Jasmine. I write up my report and they'll execute Lisbeth Pearson as a dangerous, uncontrollable psychic. Unless you can tame her, Lisbeth won't see her eleventh birthday."

  Using the child's name twice in a row--manipulation, a tug at the heartstrings. It worked like it was supposed to.

  "I'll come. It will take me a few hours to divide my patients between my fellow therapists, then I'll be there."

  "Thank you, Dr. Cooper."

  "Send all the material you have on the child. I'll give you my fax number. I'll study it all on the trip and be ready to work when I arrive."

  "It'll be to you as soon as we hang up."

  "One more thing. How do you know it's the child?"

  "I told you we don't have any other students that could do it."

  Jasmine smiled, a bitter twist of lips. "What about a teacher, a trained dreamer that's gone off the deep end?"

  "We screen our workers, Jasmine."

  "I remember."

  "Dr. Roberts was a fluke. It couldn't happen again. We see to that."

  "If you've got everything under such bloody good control, then what do you need me for?"

  "Jasmine..."

  "No, I don't want to hear any more. I'll be there as soon as I can." She hung up the phone. Sweat was beading on her forehead despite the air-conditioned quiet of the room.

  Dr. Roberts had taken a butcher knife to two students, and Jasmine would always carry the scar where she had thrown up an arm to keep the doctor from slashing her face. A guard had shot Roberts then, and she had fallen forward on her knees, still whispering, "Evil, you are all evil."

  Jasmine could control her dreams, but Roberts still accused her, questioned her at night before she could stop it. "You're evil, aren't you, Jasmine? You know you are."